


Crash The Party

by floatsodelicatelyunfinished (floatsodelicately)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Family Drama, Family Reunions, Meet the Family, the 'Hermione's relative fancies Draco - her secret husband/boyfriend' trope
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-14
Updated: 2015-03-24
Packaged: 2018-03-12 10:52:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3352961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/floatsodelicately/pseuds/floatsodelicatelyunfinished
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the Granger family reunion and Hermione's cousins are in for a surprise...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_“Never put much stock in suavity, courtesy, chivalry, gallantry_  
All that useless jewellery  
But while the rest of the girls still sigh for the night, he was smiling politely  
And while the rest of the guys are all trying  
All trying so hard.”

_Crash The Party – Ok Go_

* * *

 

Celia Fitzgerald paced back and forth in front of the fireplace. _5 minutes_. 5 minutes until they left for their grandmother’s birthday party that had become an unofficial Granger family reunion and Hermione still wasn’t here.

The two cousins had formed a sort of alliance years ago. Celia was 5 and Hermione was 4 when they decided to group together in order to survive family gatherings. Celia’s mother, Daisy, and Hermione’s father, Nick, were twins and had always been close, which meant that their daughters were too. The girls often retreated to their grandfather’s library when family events started to calm down, away from their cousins teasing or harsh remarks, David Granger’s soft spot for two of his youngest granddaughters meant that they were allowed in the sacred space. 

The alliance did the job for the most part. The girls stuck together when confronted with the whole family, the rude comments and mocking from their cousins would be ignored until they could escape to their sanctuary. It worked that way for years, until Hermione got her Hogwarts letter. When Hermione moved away to Scotland for school, Celia was alone at these things. She stuck to her parents until told to go play, or slipped away when no one was looking, her grandfather always found her and kept her hiding place secret until the end of the night when it was time to go home. He loved all of his grandchildren, but the younger girls were more delicate than the others, more vulnerable to what their parents’ described as ‘playful banter’. He knew that Celia needed Hermione at these family days. Celia often ‘got sick’ on these days, in fact, she was ‘sick’ every Sunday from October until December when Hermione came home for Christmas. That was the last Christmas that they had spent together as a family. A fight between the twins and their older brothers, Shaun, Alex and Darren, had split the family and hardly a friendly word had been exchanged between them since.

10 years later, it was time for this party. Elizabeth, their grandmother, had persuaded them all to come; using the excuse that it was her dying wish to see them all together again. _Dying wish_ , Celia scoffed, _that woman is no closer to dying than I am to marrying Elton John._ The party included the Granger’s immediate circle, extended family and a long list of friends so Elizabeth had gone all out with the decorations and the family home had never looked grander.

 _4 minutes,_ Celia thought, _that witch is cutting it close._ Just as Celia was muttering about her cousin’s lack of punctuality, the flames in the fireplace grew in height and turned green, Celia hurried over to hug her cousin who promptly stumbled out of the fire.

“Hermione!”

“Celia!”

The older woman pulled back, “You’re late.”

“Almost late,” Hermione corrected as she brushed the soot off of her coat.

“Well you’re here now, thank god! I thought you were going to make me do this all alo-“ Celia was interrupted by a knock at the door. Hermione’s mother, Anna, opened the door and stepped inside.

“Oh Hermione, I thought I heard the floo! How are you dear? Are you well? You’re not working too hard are you? I told that husband of yours to make sure that you were taking it easy-“

“Oh _believe me_ , he is. I can barely move an inch without him jumping out of his seat to help me,” Hermione huffed while her mother chuckled at the sight.

Celia grinned, “So where is the hubby? I thought he was coming to this _evening from hell_?”

Hermione rolled her eyes while Anna tutted at her niece, “He got caught up at work, he said that he’d meet us there.”

“He knows where to go?”

Hermione nodded, “We came over to see Nana and Granddad a few weeks ago, so he knows where they live.”

Nick opened the door, “There you are! Come on then, Daisy and Tom are already at the house, she just texted me and apparently they’ve already started to swarm.”

They followed Nick into the hall and were about to leave when he turned to Hermione, “Don’t you have a bag with you?”

“Oh! Yes I do, thanks for reminding me,” she rambled as she reached into her coat pockets, pulling out the beaded purse that her grandmother had given her years ago. She opened it and reached inside.

“I was thinking more ‘luggage’ rather than a tiny…purse…” he trailed off when she somehow pulled a duffel bag out of the small purse and grinned at him. He smirked back at her, “Right-o ladies, get in the car!”

The girls grumbled as they followed him to the car, Anna pausing to set the alarm and lock up the house for the weekend. Hermione set her bag down on top of her parents’ suitcase in the boot of the car and got in the back next to Celia.

“Have you heard anything then?” she asked.

“Me? I haven’t talked to any of them since that Christmas. Mum saw Aunt Christine a couple of years ago at some charity thing though, said that she was still the same old bat-“

“Celia,” Nick scolded slightly, the twist of his lip giving away his amusement.

“She is though! She’s always talking down her nose at people, literally, even tries it with people taller than her but she just looks like she’s trying to stop a nosebleed or something with how far she tips her head back.”

Nick caught Hermione’s eyes in the rear-view mirror, “So is Draco meeting us there?”

She nodded, “He got caught up at work, something about a deal with a muggle real estate company they’ve been working on, Blaise said that the agent that they’re dealing with is being difficult about closing the deal without knowing certain things that they aren’t allowed to know about.”

“What can’t they know about?”

“Well, the land that they’re buying is for a dragon reserve-“

“Dragons?!” Anna squeaked excitedly as she got in the car and heard the conversation.

Hermione smiled at her and carried on, “Anyway, they can’t disclose the real reason for buying the land and apparently the company _needs_ to know, despite there being no real legal requirement for them to know what they’ll be doing with the land.”

“So why are they asking?” Nick asked as he started the car and set off for the Granger home.

She shrugged, “Couldn’t tell you. Draco said that they’re hard to deal with, maybe they’re just nosy…?”

“Well you can’t run a company like that,” Anna said, shaking her head in disapproval. “Hasn’t this deal been going on for months? Where are all the dragons while they wait for their reserve?”

Nick chuckled, “Don’t worry, Anna, nothing’s going to happen to the little baby dragons.”

“They’re at the reserve in Romania, the one that Charlie works at. It’s shutting down because the Romanian ministry’s changing the laws on animal reserves and they’ve lost their funding. That’s why he’s moving back here, to run this new one.”

Celia perked up slightly, “Is Charlie the redhead with the _fang earring_?”

Hermione laughed and shook her head, “No, that’s Bill, his brother. He works at Gringott’s-“

“Ergh, that’s boring.”

“Hey! I work there too!”

“It’s a bank, Herms, it’s boring.”

“It isn’t boring actually, we do curse-breaking, which is quite dangerous for your information. And there was a dragon-“

“There was a dragon in the bank?” Anna twisted around in her seat.

“Good Lord, mother! What is this thing with dragons?! And yes, there was, but he isn’t there anymore…”

“What happened to him?”

Hermione shifted uncomfortably, “You don’t want to know, all that matters is he ended up in a sanctuary in Norway.”

Anna narrowed her eyes at her daughter suspiciously, “I think you’re right, this is going to be one of your ‘give-your-parents-heart-attacks’ kind of stories, isn’t it?”

“Possibly.”

“So which one’s Charlie?”

Hermione sighed happily at avoiding the bank robbery chat with her mother, “The other redhead, the one with the _tattoo’s_.”

“Ooh! Him? I liked him,” Celia grinned.

“I’m sure you did,” Hermione smirked before turning to her father. “How long does it take to get there again?”

“It’ll be about two hours from now,” he said. “Wishing you did that ‘abbarating’ thing?”

“Apparition, dad,” she corrected. “And no, I’m not allowed to do that anymore.”

“Why not?” Celia asked.

“I passed four months a few days ago. I can’t apparate anywhere without risking splinching the baby,” she said, rubbing her hand over her barely-there bump. “It’s dusty floo’s and long car rides for me now,” she pouted.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Lauren sat on the bed watching her sister, Isabelle, as she put on her makeup. Their cousin Alex was staying in the bedroom opposite theirs and had already unpacked her things, so she was sitting on Isabelle’s bed reading a magazine while they talked. Isabelle and Alex were the eldest of the grandchildren, both aged 23, the boys were younger and Lauren herself was only 16. As she was only six when the family had broken apart, Lauren didn’t remember much of her cousins Celia and Hermione, but her memories of the girls appeared to be far different than what her sister and cousins described. 

“I heard that she works in a bank,” Alex said to them, her mouth twisted in distaste as she thought of the boring office job.

“Mhm,” Isabelle hummed in response as she brushed on her eyeshadow. “And the other one is still studying,” she scoffed.

“Ergh,” Alex groaned. “That’s just like those two nerds. Remember? They’d always run off and they’d be in the library or something.”

“There’s a library here?” Lauren asked. “I’ve never seen it,” she continued, confused.

Isabelle rolled her eyes, “Why would we ever go to the library? That’s where Grandfather goes…and those two weirdo’s,” she ended with a snicker.

“I bet they’ll run off early tonight like they always used to. _Oh_ , that Hermione…all frizzy hair and buck teeth, it’ll be a miracle if we even get to see her face-“

“Why?” Lauren interrupted.

Alex laughed and continued, “She never pulled her head out of a book, I thought she’d get swallowed by one some day. Anyway,” she said, turning to Isabelle, “why were you so late?”

Isabelle span around in her seat, eyes bright with a sly smile on her face. “You know how Daddy made me get that job at the estate agents?” she waited for a nod in response. “ _Well_ , they put me on this deal with this company, the Malfoy corporation, they’re buying this big patch of land up north…anyway, I looked them up and the guy is… _well_ …by the end of this deal, I’m hoping to be the new Mrs Malfoy,” she finished with a smirk.

Lauren rolled her eyes, unseen by the other girls, “So you google’d some guy and talked to him on the phone and you’re going to get married?”

“I haven’t talked to him yet, just his assistant, who is also quite yummy if that search is anything to go by,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows at Alex who then giggled. “But I plan to, I just need to keep ‘querying’ parts of the contract and soon he’ll have to call me, then I can get a meeting and then you’ll be calling me ‘Mrs Malfoy’ by the new year!”

A little while later, the girls heard the sound of another car on the gravel at the front of the house and moved to the window. With only half an hour until the party started, the guests had started arriving slowly a while ago and the staff that their grandmother had hired had finished setting up that afternoon. The girls had stayed up in their room for as long as possible to avoid talking to their older relatives and friends of their grandparents’ who were always the first ones to turn up to parties like this. It wasn’t until later that the younger guests turned up and the girls could enjoy the party the way that they liked to.

Their mother, Christina, knocked on the door and told them to come downstairs. “Nick and Anna are here with the girls, finally, thought they’d never show. Making us wait all this time,” she shook her head and walked off down the corridor, the girls trailing behind her.

Lauren looked down at her cream shirt dress and pale floral printed cardigan, she knew that she wasn’t like her sister or her cousin, it was plain for anyone to see. Isabelle called her dress sense ‘librarian chic’ occasionally and her mother wore a similar frown whenever they went shopping. According to her granddad, Celia and Hermione were more like her and she hoped that she’d be able to get to know her cousins again without the others interfering. She followed behind the other two as they made their way past the large room that held the tables and chairs that had been set up for the party, as well as the space for the dance floor and band that Elizabeth had insisted on, and to the main door to greet the rest of the family. Isabelle was wearing a purple sequinned dress that was low-cut and had a split up the side, while Alex wore a short strapless lace dress that didn’t leave much to the imagination. Both of their dresses clung closely to their bodies, something that they told her was necessary when ‘shopping for a husband’.

They reached the entrance of the house and Lauren heard the sound of her granddad’s laugh as he greeted the newcomers. Lauren looked and saw that he was hugging two girls that she assumed were Celia and Hermione, considering that their parents were stood to the side of the car chatting amongst themselves. Neither of them looked to have ‘frizzy hair’ or ‘buck teeth’, in fact, both of them had lovely looking hair, long and curly, similar to hers. Though Isabelle and Alex both had straight blonde hair, while she had untameable brown locks that were beginning to de-frizz as she got older, _the same thing probably happened to them_ , she thought. She made her way outside and over to them, as did her mother, Isabelle and Alex.

“Come come girls,” David waved them over. “Nick, Tom and I are just going to take these bags inside and put them upstairs, then we can get this show on the road,” he said, clapping his hands together and smiling widely. The three men then left with their arms full of luggage while their mothers all walked inside, the frostiness almost visible from this short distance.

“Hello,” she smiled, slightly unsure of how to act.

They both beamed back at her, recognising their little cousin Lauren, “Hi Lauren, oh it’s been ages! Do you still-“ Celia was cut off as Isabelle stepped up to them.

“Hi Cel, Herms,” she said with a strange smirk and a nod to each of them.

“Hello Isabelle,” they both nodded. Lauren thought over how odd it seemed that the women in her family often caused this reaction in people. She saw it happen with her mother and her aunts as well as her sister and cousins. Her grandmother, it seemed, as well as her two other aunts, provoked happier responses from people. People not in their own family, that is.

“Still single then?” Alex said with a raised eyebrow and a smirk.

“’ _Still_ single’?” Celia repeated, “I haven’t seen you since we were kids, of course I was single then…I was eleven…and yes I am-“

“Of course you are,” Isabelle interrupted coldly. “What about you _Herms_?”

“Don’t call me ‘Herms’,” she said quietly.

“Oh! Avoiding the question, are we?” Alex crowed from the other side of Isabelle. “So that means that you’re not just single, but tragically so-“

“Actually, Hermione’s married,” Celia interjected.

“Sure she i-is,” Isabelle’s nasty smile faltered as Celia held up a blushing Hermione’s hand, showing off an expensive looking engagement ring and wedding band. “Why didn’t we hear of this? Are you embarrassed of your beau?” she said, attempting to recover from her shock.

“No,” Hermione answered shortly with an annoyed look at Celia. “It was just a small ceremony, close family and friends only,” she told her.

Lauren noticed that Celia mumbled something out of the side of her mouth that earned her a swat on the arm from Hermione. Seeing that Isabelle and Alex were about to launch into more questions, she hurriedly asked them to come inside and their coats were whisked away by the event staff, leaving the four older girls looking very different.

While Isabelle and Alex were dressed for ‘husband shopping’, in their clingy dresses with skin and sequins on show, the other two were dressed modestly. Celia was wearing a pale yellow floral patterned dress that seemed 60’s in style, while Hermione was wearing a deep forest green dress with a high collar and the skirt falling to just above her knees. Their dressed looked made for them as they stuck to the shape of their bodies but without clinging to every possible lump, bump, or curve that was available as Isabelle and Alex’s dresses seemed to. 

Isabelle and Alex said nothing, but their pinched expressions revealed their thoughts on the other girls. As they turned to walk into the party room, the other two shared a small smile at seeing their irritating cousins without any biting comments at the ready. This smile was then turned onto Lauren, who returned it shyly. The three of them silently made their way to the room, Hermione and Celia sure that their alliance was now extended to their little cousin who they saw was dressed in the ‘librarian chic’ style that they had both been made fun of for all those years ago.

 

**Author's Note:**

> ABANDONED. DON'T BE MAD AT ME.


End file.
